Archive for March 2011

Who would read this poem, so full
of fragments never considered
for revision: wreathes of seashells
hanging in the marshy air,
with chipped syntax
and lower case errors
beginning most lines—
messy ofs and withs, instead
of the suggested Oafs and Foes
And Wits never dealt with.

So much ignored, options pooh poohed
more than once, “changed to”
so little. Still sticking with enamored,
which I love, instead of the heavy-
handed “unarmored” withplaques of acrylic fish, but still
plagued by “possible questions”
never anticipated.

How many rules can be skipped?
How many agreements between
noun and verb can one dismiss,
even if only printed on light?

Tell me again, if a word is not
IN the dictionary, we can actually
ADD it to the dictionary?

At one time you counted my words,
and that made it seem the reverse
was true, even with your insistence
otherwise with oscillating lines.

“The check is complete.”
Someone pays, someone walks.

And so we close, grammar
a nightmare, participles tangled,
timid hyphenations, always
moving on to the next sentence,
the next disjointed
piece of typing . . . with
extra space between words,
never undoing an edit.